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Importance Sampling (IS), an effective variance reduction strategy in Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, is frequently utilized for Bayesian inference and other statistical challenges. Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) replaces the random samples in MC…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-19 Zhijian He , Hejin Wang , Xiaoqun Wang

Monte Carlo methods represent the "de facto" standard for approximating complicated integrals involving multidimensional target distributions. In order to generate random realizations from the target distribution, Monte Carlo techniques use…

Computation · Statistics 2022-01-21 L. Martino , V. Elvira , D. Luengo , J. Corander

Importance Sampling (IS) is a method for approximating expectations under a target distribution using independent samples from a proposal distribution and the associated importance weights. In many applications, the target distribution is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-14 Gabriel Cardoso , Sergey Samsonov , Achille Thin , Eric Moulines , Jimmy Olsson

Importance sampling has been known as a powerful tool to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimator for rare event simulation. Based on the criterion of minimizing the variance of Monte Carlo estimator within a parametric family, we…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-02-11 Cheng-Der Fuh , Huei-Wen Teng , Ren-Her Wang

The basic idea of importance sampling is to use independent samples from a proposal measure in order to approximate expectations with respect to a target measure. It is key to understand how many samples are required in order to guarantee…

Computation · Statistics 2017-01-17 S. Agapiou , O. Papaspiliopoulos , D. Sanz-Alonso , A. M. Stuart

The inefficiency of using an unbiased estimator in a Monte Carlo procedure can be quantified using an inefficiency constant, equal to the product of the variance of the estimator and its mean computational cost. We develop methods for…

Computation · Statistics 2016-01-08 Tomasz Badowski

We explore efficient estimation of statistical quantities, particularly rare event probabilities, for stochastic reaction networks. Consequently, we propose an importance sampling (IS) approach to improve the Monte Carlo (MC) estimator…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Chiheb Ben Hammouda , Nadhir Ben Rached , Raúl Tempone , Sophia Wiechert

The Effective Sample Size (ESS) is an important measure of efficiency of Monte Carlo methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Importance Sampling (IS) techniques. In the IS context, an approximation $\widehat{ESS}$ of the…

Computation · Statistics 2016-09-27 L. Martino , V. Elvira , F. Louzada

Sequential analysis encompasses simulation theories and methods where the sample size is determined dynamically based on accumulating data. Since the conceptual inception, numerous sequential stopping rules have been introduced, and many…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-02 Jiezhong Wu , Reiichiro Kawai

Estimating the probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds a given threshold is a well-known challenging problem. Closed-form expression of the sum distribution is usually intractable and presents an open problem. A crude Monte…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-09-23 Nadhir Ben Rached , Fatma Benkhelifa , Abla Kammoun , Mohamed-Slim Alouini , Raul Tempone

Importance sampling (IS) and numerical integration methods are usually employed for approximating moments of complicated target distributions. In its basic procedure, the IS methodology randomly draws samples from a proposal distribution…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-12 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , Pau Closas

Importance sampling is a common technique for Monte Carlo approximation, including Monte Carlo approximation of p-values. Here it is shown that a simple correction of the usual importance sampling p-values creates valid p-values, meaning…

Computation · Statistics 2011-04-12 Matthew T. Harrison

Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-04 Anas Cherradi , Yazid Janati , Alain Durmus , Sylvain Le Corff , Yohan Petetin , Julien Stoehr

Importance sampling is a variance reduction technique for efficient estimation of rare-event probabilities by Monte Carlo. In standard importance sampling schemes, the system is simulated using an a priori fixed change of measure suggested…

Probability · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Paul Dupuis , Hui Wang

The effective sample size (ESS) is widely used in sample-based simulation methods for assessing the quality of a Monte Carlo approximation of a given distribution and of related integrals. In this paper, we revisit the approximation of the…

Computation · Statistics 2022-04-14 Víctor Elvira , Luca Martino , Christian P. Robert

Importance sampling is a rare event simulation technique used in Monte Carlo simulations to bias the sampling distribution towards the rare event of interest. By assigning appropriate weights to sampled points, importance sampling allows…

This paper investigates asymptotically optimal importance sampling (IS) schemes for pricing European call options under the Heston stochastic volatility model. We focus on two distinct rare-event regimes where standard Monte Carlo methods…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-11-26 Yun-Feng Tu , Chuan-Hsiang Han

An importance sampling approach for sampling copula models is introduced. We propose two algorithms that improve Monte Carlo estimators when the functional of interest depends mainly on the behaviour of the underlying random vector when at…

Computation · Statistics 2015-04-08 Philipp Arbenz , Mathieu Cambou , Marius Hofert

Importance sampling is a technique that is commonly used to speed up Monte Carlo simulation of rare events. However, little is known regarding the design of efficient importance sampling algorithms in the context of queueing networks. The…

Probability · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Paul Dupuis , Ali Devin Sezer , Hui Wang

Importance sampling (IS) is a common reweighting strategy for off-policy prediction in reinforcement learning. While it is consistent and unbiased, it can result in high variance updates to the weights for the value function. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Matthew Schlegel , Wesley Chung , Daniel Graves , Jian Qian , Martha White